Subject: AbiWord 0.7.10
From: Robert Sievers (bob@abisource.com)
Date: Thu Jun 15 2000 - 21:48:08 CDT
... is out,.
The AbiWord team has been busy. Even though it has only been six weeks
since AbiWord 0.7.9 hit the streets there are a bunch of surprises in store
for those people who do not closely follow the development list. AbiWord
0.7.10 includes a host of new features and a ton of bug fixes accelerating
the trip to AbiWord 1.0. The sheer number of new members to AbiSource
team has ballooned, reaching a total of 100 different individuals who have
contributed to the AbiSource project.
Selected highlights since 0.7.9 include:
1. GNOME builds. Due to extensive work by Joaquín Cuenca Abela and many
others, AbiWord now utilizes the GNOME front end. This is not so much an
individual feature or effort, but a cumulative one. GNOME binaries are now
available in RPM format for Intel architectures.
2. Editing Improvements. Bruce Pearson fixed some of the more visible
editing problems AbiWord previously had. For example, now when you erase
all characters in a paragraph, the font size and format do not reset to the
default. This problem manifested itself in a number of ways, such as
incorrect line spacing on blank paragraphs when the font size was changed,
and many other small annoyances General editing around font size and
format boundaries makes much more sense now. Also, Jesper Skov provided
more intelligent cursor motion at line boundaries.
3. Show Paragraphs. Alexey Sintutin added the basic framework for this
feature which allows invisible characters such as tabs, page breaks and
section breaks to be visible. Hard paragraph breaks are not yet shown, but
the current implementation of Show Paragraphs goes a long way.
4. Modeless dialogs. Martin Sevior extended his work on the Insert Symbol
dialog by making it modeless. To do so, he had to implement an entire
modeless dialog framework. This work paves the way for other contributors
to make other dialogs modeless as well. Everyone who enjoys leaving
dialogs active while doing other actions applauds this effort.
5. Word count dialog. This addition has been simmering for some
time. Sam Tobin-Hochstatd created the dialog, and it is now available in
the UNIX builds. Traditionally, AbiWord development proceeds with a dialog
appearing on one OS first, then it is quickly ported to all other operating
systems, so Windows users should see this dialog added shortly.
6. GoTo dialog. Joaquín Cuenca Abela was busy this month. This dialog
also makes its appearance on UNIX, and should also appear on Windows
soon. Now you can GoTo a specific line or page on the fly.
7. Help. AbiWord now has on-line help. These help files are included in
the distribution courtesy of Christophe Caron
(ChrisDigo@aol.com) Currently, help is available in French and
English. This feature is a great testimony of how individuals can make a
real difference in an Open Source project. The English translation of the
files are still a little rough around the edges, but these will continue to
improve as we have toward AbiWord 1.0.
8. RTF Improvements. Hubert Figuiere fixed a number of RTF related
issues. For example, now optional hyphens import correctly (#837), RTF
export no longer produces extra spaces after accented characters (#569),
and AbiWord now correctly imports accented characters in RTF files created
by TED (#886).
9. Ruler fixes. Previously, there were a number of ways to cause problems
in AbiWord by moving page and paragraph margins in the ruler in ways they
were not supposed to be moved. A tag team effort of Alexey Sintutin
(megabyte@salesexplosion.com) and Aaron Lehmann (aaronl@vitelus.com) has
done a thorough job of eliminating almost all possible cases.
10. Mucho Bug fixes. Better error checking for command line arguments
was added by Sam Tobin-Hochstatd (#250). Windows and Linux printouts now
have identical margins, courtesy of Mike Nordell (#274). Better handling
of images in multi-column documents from Aaron Lehmann. The X11-multi key
no longer causes problems courtesy of HJ (#435). Matt Kraai made sure
that changing justification no longer causes tabs to get lost
(#443). Martin Sevior also took time out to fix a crashing bug relating to
zooming and selections (#596). Postscript output now handles colored text
when LC_NUMERIC is set thanks to Kenny MacDonald (#604). Postscript page
numbers now work correctly due to Hubert Figuiere (#843).. Cut and Paste
with gnome terminals now works thanks to Petr Tesarik. The LaTeX exporter
now exports line height, left and the right margins, and justification
thanks to Joaquín Cuenca Abela. Finally, Mike Meyer added some code to make
the AbiWord font reader on UNIX more robust.
11. Code cleanup. Mike Nordell swept through the AbiWord code base like a
whirlwind, fixing all sorts of little code oddities. It is likely that
this a fixed a number of problems never before identified.
12. Development environment improvements. Michael D. Pritchett
(MPritchett@attglobal.net)
figured out how to work around the new Cygnus tools while Jesper Skov added
some internal functions to make it easier for AbiWord developers to peer
into AbiWord's internal structures. Also, Bernhard Rosenkraenzer fixes some
issues with newer versions of GCC. All of these changes mean it will be
easier for even more contributors to join the AbiSource project.
13. Translations. A Galician translation was added by Jesus Bravo Alvarez
(jba@pobox.com)
The following translations have been updated: Danish (Birger Langkjer and
Martin Hansen), German (Harald Fernengel), Spanish (Joaquín Cuenca Abela),
and Swedish (Linus G Larsson)
In other recent news, the Word export feature continues to draw ever closer
thanks to James Montgomerie. Also, work continues on other critical
features such as Fields. More to come!
Robert Sievers
Open Source Evangelist
Robert Sievers
Open Source Evangelist
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